Digital Scams Continue to Grow, Cross-Border Criminal Businesses with Significant Economic Value

JAKARTA — The threat of digital scams or fraud is developing with increasingly adaptive and diverse patterns, in line with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI). VIDA’s Group CEO Niki Luhur revealed that scammers today can no longer be viewed as individuals operating alone. Behind many current digital attacks, there are more organised networks, coordinated efforts, and support from increasingly advanced technical capabilities. “Scams now no longer operate randomly or individually. Their methods are already more organised, structured, can be executed on a large scale, and their sophistication is developing rapidly,” stated the boss of the company providing digital identity and fraud prevention solutions in the Endgame podcast with former Indonesian Minister of Trade Gita Wirjawan recently. This discussion also marked the official launch of VIDA’s 2026 SEA Digital Identity Fraud Outlook whitepaper, which captures how the digital fraud landscape in Southeast Asia continues to evolve, both in terms of attack sophistication, the utilisation of generative technology, and the ways perpetrators read public trust and liquidity movements. Furthermore, Niki emphasised that scams have now developed into cross-border criminal businesses with very significant economic value. He cited the revelation of a case involving Cambodia and Myanmar, with the seizure of Bitcoin assets worth $14 billion (equivalent to more than Rp238 trillion). Niki also highlighted reports of 800 Indonesian citizens queuing at the Indonesian Embassy in Cambodia to return home after being trapped in forced labour within scam networks. According to Niki, this case confirms that scams are no longer ordinary digital fraud but a cross-border issue with growing impacts. At the same time, AI developments such as deepfakes and synthetic identities are making the boundary between real and fake increasingly thin. This technology enables fake content to appear more realistic, convincing, and produced far more quickly than a few years ago.